


Negative Space

by nibelheimed



Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Angst, F/M, Post-Advent Children
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-11
Updated: 2019-09-11
Packaged: 2020-10-14 17:17:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,549
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20604428
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nibelheimed/pseuds/nibelheimed
Summary: Today is the day she's been waiting for: Tifa wakes, and the spaces Cloud fills are empty.





	Negative Space

This is it:

The day she's been dreading for weeks, months—years, perhaps, if she were truly honest with herself. In the two years it's been, this day has been sat in the pit of her stomach, unrelenting, churning her belly and stealing her breath.

Somehow she had known as soon as she had woken. Well, no—she hadn't. In those few moments—seconds, minutes, who knows—where dreams ebb away and the waking world creeps in, she had been blissfully ignorant. Her only concern had been keeping her eyes open; dozing off again wouldn't do when there was so much work to do.

Then that churning in her stomach crept up her chest and settled on her ribs, squeezing and crushing and bruising.

The house was quiet, save for the dreamy murmurs of little voices and the incessant pounding of her own heart. There was the chirruping of birds and the faint rumbling of early commuters outside. But inside, where there should have been glass clinking and the kettle boiling and taps running and floorboards creaking and toothpaste spat, there was nothing.

Nothing, except the thump-thump-thump of her heart and the echo of her own voice in her ears:

He's gone.

He was a creature of habit in the mornings, a byproduct, she supposed, of his time enlisted in the Shinra Army. Cloud didn't talk much about his days as an infantryman, but when Denzel had asked how he could function so early, he'd shared the kind of routine he was forced into while he was in the military: up at dawn, breakfast eaten, ready for drills an hour later; training and classes—or assignments, later on—right up until dinner, after which his kit needed to be readied (uniform washed and ironed; rifle taken apart and cleaned) before he could finally fall into bed at midnight, if he was lucky. Getting up early to run deliveries was nothing after that.

(Tifa knows it's a habit leftover from their time together as AVALANCHE, too, tracking Sephiroth across Gaia, when every minute spare was time to be spent on the move, fighting forwards, but they talk about that time less, especially with the children.)

His alarm is set for 5AM and wails precisely once before he shuts it off. She knows because it wakes her, though where he rises and gets on with his day, she turns onto her other side, spending the next hour not quite asleep but not awake either. Eyes closed again, it's in this midway state that she hears the creak of his footsteps across the hallway; the running of water while he brushes his teeth; the accidental clattering of mugs together when he reaches one down for his coffee. He's always quiet, careful not to wake the children or herself, but these little noises have become the soundtrack to her mornings.

So when she realises that no, it wasn't the alarm clock that woke her this morning, and no, she hasn't slept in, the sudden and unexpected wrongness of this morning clutches at her until she can't breathe.

And there's only one explanation for why the air is so still and heavy and void of his presence, isn't there?

Because his absence has been felt before.

Her first, panicked instinct is to chase him. She's on her feet without realising it; there's an itch in her legs telling her to move, just move, go find him and bring him home. Drag him by the ear like a naughty child, if needs must.

He's not doing this again, running away, making the children's lives hell. Making her life hell.

And that's what she's doing, chasing him. She's downstairs in a flash once she's checked his room, double-checked that it's not him who's overslept, and she's ducking her head into every doorway she passes. Inexplicably, she looks in the bar's walk-in freezer, as if she'd find him there, leaning against the racking half-dressed and complaining about the summer heat.

Of course, she comes up empty. No Cloud in the freezer, cooling down his feverish skin. No Cloud in the living room, listening to the news on the radio while he wakes up enough to head out on the road. No Cloud in the kitchen, wolfing down a breakfast big enough for two.

No Cloud.

And suddenly, she halts. She's stood in the hallway and it's the biggest it's ever felt (except for that one time before) even though the walls hug tight and the panic, the anxiety ebbs away as quickly as it came. When the wave rolls back in, it's not uncertainty and fear: it's resolution.

He's not doing this again. She won't let him.

She's not chasing him down again, bringing him home again, watching Marlene and Denzel learn to trust him again. He's made his decision. If they're not a part of that—the bar, the children, Tifa—if they're not a part of it, then—

—then she'll have to accept it.

She stands in the hallway, and she takes a deep breath, fills her lungs until they're fit to burst. Tries to breathe away the crushing in her chest and the stinging in her eyes. Tries to regulate her pulse and the shaking in her hands.

It works. She feels like that little girl again, so long ago now, left alone at the base of that mountain, all the boys gone off to war or to find riches and fame. Tifa Lockhart, daughter of the mayor of Nibelheim, mountain guide, and the only person she could count on.

It’s a resolution she’d first discovered on the mats of Zangan’s dojo and perfected later on in the streets of Midgar, left with no one besides her adopted ecoterrorist family. It was up to her to protect herself back then, and it is up to her to protect herself now.

It’s a resolution that is steadfast, until it isn’t.

About to turn on her heel, begin her working day, she takes a breath to allow herself a moment of weakness. She stares at the front door, solid and unmoving, and lets herself just feel. The bitter disappointment. The crushing loneliness. The anger and regret and guilt building within her chest. It all threatens to spill over. Her breath hitches. Her eyes sting. Her lip trembles.

Her entire body jolts with the bang at the door. It isn’t particularly hard but in the silence of the house it’s deafening. It’s a wooden slap, and then a metallic clattering of the door handle, and the creaking of the hinges as the door swings open. Cloud comes stumbling in, sweat-laden bangs sticking to his forehead, cheeks flushed and breathing heavy, water bottle in hand and old gym clothes adorning his frame.

He stops dead, one foot over the threshold, the other left behind on the doorstep, and in between his heaving pants, with a look in his eyes that's a mix of exhaustion and concern, he manages to push out, "Tifa? You okay?"

She collapses. Right there in the hallway her knees give out and she's on the floor, one hand over her mouth holding back her choked sobs and the other doing its best to hold her up. Everything she'd been trying to hold in comes rushing out of her all at once.

The guilt. The loneliness. The fear.

Cloud had left. For a run. To workout. He had left for a perfectly innocuous reason and with a definite intent to return. She had jumped to conclusions based on —what? The sound of birds and the lack of sound of anything else?

And yet—

What else was she supposed to think? Not too long ago, the circumstances had been the same, and he hadn't returned that morning, or the morning after that, or the mornings after that.

Maybe every day that she woke and he was out for a run, or delivering a customer's package, or socialising and doing things any normal person would be doing, she'd be here on the floor, chest crushed with anxiety and sick to the stomach with fear.

Tears spill from her chin to the floor. Maybe this wasn't any way to live. Maybe there was no way back for them. They'd tried, oh how she'd tried, but there was too much past, too much history, too much.

Warm fingers grip her arms, thumbs massaging circles into her biceps. Through her wracking sobs, she catches his voice, slightly off-rhythm as he tries to catch his breath, but low and comforting all the same: "Hey, it's okay. It's okay, Tifa, I'm here."

He pulls her to him, then, and she lets him. Settles her cheek against his shoulder, feels the rise and fall of his chest, the slowing beat of his heart beneath. He doesn't say anything more. The quietness continues around them: the birds chirruping, the rumbling of early commuters, sleepy murmurings from little voices upstairs. No water running for his morning shower, no radio warning of traffic congestion downtown, no yawns as he tries to wake up enough to head out on the road.

But buried in his shoulder, his chin resting gently atop her head as he wraps his arms around her, both of them folded up on the floor, it's a different kind of quiet.

And Cloud’s here.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to Marle_Nadia, Caramel_Potato and Denebola_Leo for beta reading!


End file.
